This fortnight in Drupal core: February 8, 2014

What's new with Drupal 8?

It's been a remarkable couple of weeks for Drupal 8, with several landmark changes, a global sprint, and a surge in core issue queue activity.

Global sprint weekend

The second Global Sprint Weekend was held January 25-26. Over 400 sprinters participated at 39 locations on six continents, with others participating remotely in IRC. Some quick core issue queue statistics from the sprint timeframe:

80 new Drupal 8 core issues created

553 Drupal 8 patches submitted

2468 comments posted on 646 Drupal 8 issues

113 Drupal 8 issues RTBCed

A huge thanks to everyone who participated, and especially to the sprint organizers and mentors who helped make it happen.

On January 31, in preparation for this change, core contributors reduced the missing change record count from 40 to 20 in 24 hours. We actually halved this long-outstanding documentation debt within a single day. Amazing work!

Theme system conversions

Core theme system contributors have been busy the past several weeks, converting numerous theme functions to Twig and removing all calls to theme() outside drupal_render() (and some automated tests). This important theme system cleanup has been ongoing for more than seven months and blocks a beta release.

Here's a quick look at our progress on criticals and beta blockers in January:

We tied our previous record of 48 criticals fixed within a single month, but this time while posting fewer new ones than that. ;) Great work!

We fixed a grand total of 37 beta blockers in January, putting us past the halfway point for the beta! We also made great progress on cleaning up the API documentation debt of our outstanding change records -- from over 50 at the start of the month to 19 at the end (and just 12 as of today)! That said, we also identified 20-odd additional beta-blocking issues over the course of the month, so it's important to keep our focus on these top-priority issues.

Where can I help?

Top criticals to hit this week

Each week, we check with core maintainers and contributors for the "extra critical" criticals that are blocking other work. These issues are often tough problems with a long history. If you're familiar with the problem space of one of these issues and have the time to dig in, help drive it forward by reviewing, improving, and testing its patch, and by making sure the issue's summary is up to date and any API changes are documented with a draft change record.

#2188771: [meta] Block API documentation . Drupal 8 has a harder-better-faster-stronger Block API that makes core blocks far more flexible and developer-friendly than they've been in previous versions of Drupal, but near all documentation for it is outdated, confusing, or missing entirely. Help on some of the many documentation issues listed in this meta.

As always, if you're new to contributing to core, check out Core contribution mentoring hours. Twice per week, you can log into IRC and helpful Drupal core mentors will get you set up with answers to any of your questions, plus provide some useful issues to work on.

Notable Commits

The best of git log --after=2014-01-24 --pretty=oneline (191 commits in total):

Drupal 8 in "Real Life"

Feb. 14 - 17: Drupal South in Wellington, New Zealand features a keynote by Larry Garfield of WSCCI fame, larowlan and kim.pepper answering everything you you wanted to know about Drupal 8 but were afraid to ask, as well as sessions on Twig, Tour, and more!

Mar. 28 - 30: If you'd like to collaborate with DevDays Szeged sprinters, but are looking for something in the western hemisphere, check out MidCamp. MidCamp is March 28-30, and there may also be a pre-sprint March 26-27. Contact ZenDoodles for more information.

Whew! That's a wrap!

Do you follow Drupal Planet with devotion, or keep a close eye on the Drupal event calendar, or git pull origin 8.x every morning without fail before your coffee? We're looking for more contributors to help compile these posts. You could either take a few hours once every six weeks or so to put together a whole post, or help with one section more regularly. Contact xjm if you'd like to help communicate all the interesting happenings in Drupal 8!